Are Muslims allowed to be Sympathetic Victims in US Media, or only Perpetrators?

By Juan Cole | Sep. 3, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Libyan activist Hend Amry makes an important point about the relative lack of interest of television news in stories such as the persecution of the Burmese (Myanmar) Muslims by the Buddhist establishment:

When Muslims are the victims of terrorism, there isn't the fraction of western attention as when they're the perpetrators. https://t.co/yxFOR8O4TY

— Hend Amry (@LibyaLiberty) September 2, 2017

When Muslims are perpetrators, as in Brussels, Paris and Barcelona, the mass media often goes into 24/7 coverage mode usually reserved for natural disasters and Trump’s tweet storms.

But the horrific attacks on the Rohingya Muslims of Burma (Myanmar), which have forced thousands to flee in recent days, have elicited no interest. I did keyword searches for Rohingya, Burma and Myanmar in Broadcast News in a major database. I got lots of hits for the BBC and AsianNews and a few from EuroNews. Nothing from US networks or cable news in the past week. Nothing. As a control, I searched Hurricane Harvey, and got hits from all the major US television media on the front page. In other words, a major human rights crisis is invisible to viewers of American television news.

As for other Muslim victims, I don’t need to bother to research. You will almost never see any mention in US television news of the severe human rights violations daily perpetrated by Israelis against the Palestinians of the West Bank, including theft of property, destruction of buildings and orchards, and assault. This is a low-intensity human rights catastrophe and has been going on for decades. But if Palestinians victimize Jews in Israel, then it is another 24/7 blanket coverage. It should be, and Jews should not be victimized. But you also have to cover what is being done to Palestinians who are militarily occupied.

Or take Yemen, which is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world now that al-Assad has won the civil war for the moment. The United States is backing the Saudi-led war on Yemen to the hilt, with logistical support and even help in choosing targets to bomb. The bombing began in spring of 2015. By now, you have millions living on the edge, who could fall into starvation is just one more thing went wrong. (Social scientists call this being “food insecure”). You have a massive cholera outbreak. Not to mention the people killed or wounded by Saudi and allied air strikes. Whatever you think of the battling sides in the war, surely we can all agree that the children being victimized are innocent.

But you’d go blind scanning the television in the US for news about the Yemen war. And remember, it is to some extent an American war! NBC’s intrepid Richard Engel, among the best in the business, is an exception here but even he hasn’t been given more than a spot or two over the past two years.

As for ISIL, most of its victims have been Muslims, but you’d never know that from the television news coverage.

In the old days, print newspapers were an important avenue for people to get news, but they have been eclipsed (even for our “president”) by broadcast news. And broadcast news is doing such a bad and imbalanced job of covering the world for viewers that it should be sued for malpractice or false advertising (I can almost never find any actual news on cable news channels).

The prejudices of top cable and network news executives are warping the consciousness of our whole country. In this bizarro world, Muslims are never victims and never presented sympathetically, while whenever some emerge as perpetrators, they are made out to be ten feet tall.

No wonder we’ve ended up with a president, shaped by right wing cable and you tube news “services,” who wants to ban Muslims. The prejudices of our billionaires are defining what “news” is and distorting national policy in dangerous ways.

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Posted in Displaced and Refugees,Featured,Islam-hatred,Islamophobia,Israel/ Palestine,Myanmar,Yemen | 6 Responses | Print |

Texas Wind turbines went right on Turning under Harvey’s impact, as Refineries Shut Down

By Juan Cole | Sep. 2, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Extreme weather is in our future. Caribbean hurricanes of the future will be more and more violent and destructive because of manmade global heating. Sea level rise will open the coast to bigger storm surges. The number of coastal floods has already doubled since the 1980s because of people driving their gasoline cars and running their air conditioners off burning lumps of coal. Hotter air over hotter water will have more moisture in it, setting the stage for regular flooding. Hotter water creates more powerful winds within hurricanes.

So the bad news is that a fossil fuel energy system does not deal well with extreme weather.

Even just by Thursday, Harvey had shut down so many oil refineries that it had taken 20% of daily US gasoline production off line. By Friday it was being announced that so many refineries had been damaged that the major pipeline that brings 3 million barrels a day to the east coast, had been shut down. Altogether, 4.4 mn b/d of refinery capacity is off line now. About half a million barrels a day of refining capacity will remain shut down well into next winter.

Reuters quoted a market analyst as saying, “Imports can’t make up for this. . . This is going to be the worst thing the U.S. has seen in decades from an energy standpoint.”

Not only is gasoline going to be more expensive as a result, but the pollution dangers from the damaged refineries are horrific.

But guess what? Texas’s wind turbines weathered Harvey. Some were pushed to the max by its powerful winds, but they just went on making electricity! Turbines shut down if the wind is 55 mph or more, but most wind farms affected by Harvey were able to keep operating. One shut down because the electrical wires were knocked down, not because the turbines stopped working!. On an average day, Texas gets 20% of its electricity from wind. That only fell to 13% the day of Harvey’s landfall.

Harvey also menaced a nuclear reactor, a la Fukushima, but we dodged that bullet this time.

Nuclear reactors no longer make any sense, and they remain dangerous and vulnerable to extreme weather events. Even if wind turbines did get damaged by a storm, they don’t explode or spread around radioactive fallout.

Duke Energy has just abandoned plans for a nuclear reactor and is instead putting $6 bn into solar and wind.

So it turns out that not only would a rapid turn to 100% green energy, as California plans, forestall further global heating, it can help keep us safe during the extreme weather caused by . . . burning fossil fuels in the first place.

The problem of fossil fuels and global heating is only going to get worse. The National Institutes of Health warns,

“The public health impacts of climate change in U.S. Gulf Coast states—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—may be especially severe and further exacerbated by a range of threats facing the coastline areas, including severe erosion, subsidence, and—given the amount of energy production infrastructure—the ever-present potential for large-scale industrial accidents. The Gulf Coast population is expected to reach over 74 million by 2030 with a growing number of people living along the coastlines. Populations in the region that are already vulnerable because of economic or other disparities may face additional risks to health . . . The Gulf region is expected to experience increased mean temperatures and longer heat waves while freezing events are expected to decrease. Regional average temperatures across the U.S. Southeast region (which includes Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, North and South Carolina as well as the Gulf Coast) are projected to increase between 4 °F to 8 °F (2.2 °C to 4.4 °C) throughout the century. Hurricanes and sea level rise, occurring independently or in combination with hurricane-induced storm surge, are major threats to the Gulf Coast region [11]. Some portions of the Gulf Coast—particularly coastal Louisiana and South Florida—are especially vulnerable to sea level rise due to their low elevation.”

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Posted in Climate Change,Extreme Weather,Featured,wind energy | 6 Responses | Print |

As Trump probes move against Iran, IAEA certifies its Compliance with Nuclear Deal

By Juan Cole | Sep. 1, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The warmongers in the Trump administration (you didn’t fall for that isolationism scam did you?) have been exploring ways to blow up the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump has repeatedly castigated as “a very bad deal.”

One ploy they’ve fixed on is to demand inspections of the Parchin military base, on the pretext that nuclear-related experiments are going on there, and not being inspected by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty exempts military bases from such inspections, at American and Soviet/ Russian insistence. So Iran has no treaty obligation to allow inspections of its military bases.

Trump has also ordered that the State Department do its own assessment of Iranian compliance every 90 days. The State Department, apparently to the disappointment of administration hawks, has already come back with a finding of compliance.

The Iran deal was in fact much more favorable to the US and the Security Council than to Iran. Iran had to give up a great deal, and all it got in return was a lifting of UN economic sanctions (the US Congress has actually made US sanctions on Iran *more* severe in the wake of the agreement; the US is about 22% of the world economy).

What the deal did was to close off all the pathways to an Iranian nuclear bomb. Iran had to severely limit the number of centrifuges it runs. It had to destroy stockpiles of uranium enriched to 19.5%. It had to mothball and brick in a heavy water reactor, since heavy water reactors are easier to use to build up and harvest fissile material from the rods. It had to allow IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities to ensure that no plutonium signatures can be detected.

There is nothing going on at the Parchin military base that contravenes any of these responsibilities, and Iran has no duty under either the NPT or the 2015 deal to allow such inspections. Moreover, the IAEA thinks the demand is daft.

So the International Atomic Energy Agency certified this week that Iran is in compliance with the deal.

Its members pointed out that Parchin has already been inspected, in 2015. One evinced suspicion of Trump’s motives, observing, “We’re not going to visit a military site like Parchin just to send a political signal . . . If they want to bring down the deal, they will . . . We just don’t want to give them an excuse to.”

The IAEA said that Iran does not have more than the 661 pounds of low-enriched uranium allowed by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

End of story.

There are no banks of centrifuges at the Parchin military base and there is no stockpile of low-enriched uranium (which anyway is only useful for fueling reactors at power plants to make electricity). The US has Parchin under satellite surveillance, and there would be ways of telling if it were using a lot of water and electricity, both necessary for the kind of nefarious activities that Nikki Haley is alleging occur there.

Haley is from India, which developed a nuclear weapon, and represents the United States, which has a large stockpile of nuclear warheads, so it is a little funny to see her beating up Iran, which doesn’t have a bomb and whose religious leader says such weapons are forbidden by Islamic law.

The only reason that the Trumpies are demanding inspections of Parchin is that they know Iran will reject the demand. It is a sort of ultimatum, and the point of an ultimatum is to provoke a war.

The Iran deal was signed by Russia, China, Britain, France, the US, and Germany as an informal representative of the European Union. Only one of the signatories is making trouble now, despite continual certifications of the experts that Iran is in compliance. That country is the US, which has a history of coup-making, invasions and occupation in the Middle East.

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Posted in Featured,Internet,Islamophobia,journalism,media,social media | 23 Responses | Print |

Turkey-Backed fundamentalist Militias attack US Troops in Syria

By Juan Cole | Aug. 31, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

US troops in Syria operating north of Manbij have been fired on twice in the last couple of weeks. The attackers are fundamentalist remnants of the Free Syrian Army, backed by Turkey.

The US has tried to persuade rebel groups to concentrate their firepower on ISIL (IS, ISIS, Daesh) rather than on the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad. It hasn’t been particularly successful. The Arab fighters, many of them linked to the old Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, still desperately want the regime to fall, and they’ve expended far more energy attacking it that they ever did in attacking Daesh.

The US troops are closely allied with the Syrian Kurdish YPG or People’s Protection Units, a leftist paramilitary that favors women’s rights and cooperatives. As leftists, these Kurds are relatively secular-minded, though they are nominally for the most part Sunni Muslims (some are Yazidis).

The Arab fundamentalist fighters are nearly as scathing about the leftist Kurds as they are about the Baath regime.

The Kurds have exacerbated tensions with Arabs by attempting to establish a land bridge between the Kurdish enclaves of Kobane and of Afrin in the west, between which lie Arab villages. Arabs accuse the Kurds of ethnically cleansing Arab villages that stand in the way of this unification of Kurdish territory.

So there is a low-intensity struggle between the US-backed Kurds and the Turkey-backed remnants of the Free Syrian Army. Since the US strongly supports the Kurds, its personnel are being targeted by the Arab fundamentalists.

The US sent over a sharp note of protest to Turkey’s foreign ministry. Turkey is a NATO ally, but you couldn’t tell it by its relative disinterest in the rolling up of ISIL. On the other hand, Turkish troops did not assist in the attack on their American forces and Turkish sources insist that they helped halt the Arab fundamentalist assaults.

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Related video:

“FREE SYRIAN ARMY ATTACKED US TROOPS”

Posted in Featured,Kurds,Turkey | 9 Responses | Print |

China smashes 2020 solar power target, leaves US & Europe in Dust

By Juan Cole | Aug. 31, 2017 |

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By Sam Morgan | ( EURACTIV.com) | – –

China eclipses Europe as 2020 solar power target is smashed.

China has reached its 2020 solar power target three years ahead of schedule, after installed capacity topped well over its 105GW target. Europe has been urged to show similar ambition.

New figures published by solar industry firm Asia Europe Clean Energy (Solar) Advisory (AECEA) last week revealed that China has exceeded its 2020 target of 105GW of installed solar capacity, after new builds in June and July pushed it up beyond 112GW.

Solar power is enjoying a sunny 2017 in China, after the first half of this year saw capacity increased by 24.4GW, dwarfing similar efforts in Europe, and cementing China’s status as the world’s leading solar nation.

Sun sets on nuclear as solar capacity catches up with atomic power

Solar photovoltaic capacity (PV) will soon match and even overtake nuclear energy’s global capacity, according to new US research. High demand means PV could even become the globe’s dominant energy source by 2050.

China is not planning to rest on its laurels either. Officials have recently tweaked its 2017 forecast for new solar installations and figures now suggest that total new capacity for this year could reach 45GW. In contrast, in 2016 Germany’s total capacity was 41.1GW.

Renewable energy groups have called on Europe to be more like China and strive to be number one in the sector. SolarPower Europe association urged the EU to increase the current 27% renewable energy target for 2030 to 35%.

The association’s recent Global Market Outlook concluded that only a 35% target will maintain the impetus for the renewable industry. It also estimated that the bloc will struggle to hit the current 27% goal unless ambitions are raised.

China’s ambitions are admittedly impressive. It already boasts the largest solar farm in the world, which measures in at over 30 square kilometres. It also recently opened the world’s largest floating solar farm, which is positioned over an old coal mine.

But once capacity and landmark projects are excluded from the equation, the Chinese solar sector does have significant problems. Although China hit its 2020 target, only 1% of its energy demand is satisfied by solar power. Coal still reigns supreme in its energy mix.

There is also the issue of subsidies. Feed-in-tariffs, paid to solar companies to generate power and make the market more attractive, have often arrived late, hurting the bottom lines of many of those energy firms.

Via EURACTIV.com

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

China Leaving United States Behind On Green Energy Jobs | On Assignment with Richard Engel | MSNBC

Posted in China,European Union,Solar Energy | 2 Responses | Print |

The Criminals who amplified Harvey: Trump & Cabinet must Resign

By Juan Cole | Aug. 30, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The whole Trump administration should resign in shame, since they have lied to the American people about the disaster of burning fossil fuels.

The policies of climate change denial made Hurricane Harvey far worse than it would ordinarily have been, some scientists say by as much as 30%. If the US had started a crash program to curb emissions back in the 1970s when Exxon Mobil scientists confirmed the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions, which lead to global heating, the once in a 500-year year storm might not have been nearly as severe.

Who led the charge in denying manmade climate change and trying to muddy the waters about the menace of burning fossil fuels?

Exxon Mobil.

Where is Exxon Mobil?

The HQ is in Dallas and there is a big new state of the art campus in Houston. (The web page for it mentions “sustainability” but ExxonMobil is a master of greenwashing. Only about 1% of their research budget goes to renewables and almost everything they do involves finding, producing and selling petroleum, the burning of which in automobiles causes global heating.). In other words, Exxon Mobil is fouling its own nest and it expects you and me to pay for it.

And who was the head of Exxon Mobil?

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Tillerson may as well have been down on the shore scooping buckets of water from the sea and throwing them on Houston.

A new study shows that Exxon Mobil went to enormous trouble to deny climate change from 1977 right until today.

Tillerson, while CEO of Exxon Mobil, maintained a special email address for discussing climate change, under the name of “Wayne Tracker.”

Trump himself attempted to make climate change look like a Chinese plot.

The Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt is closing down the EPA for all practical purposes, leaving the rest of us open to being poisoned by amoral corporations. One of the poisons Pruitt is plotting to unleash on us is vastly increased carbon dioxide emissions.

Rick Perry was governor of Texas and he encouraged gas and oil interests and put billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which has now returned in the form of Harvey to bite his state in the ass. His Energy Department just instructed a scientist to take out mention of climate change from an application to the department for funding.

This is not an administration, it is a rogues gallery of environmental criminals.

Want to know why we’re having a once in a 500 years storm and flood in Texas?

Because of Trump and his buddies on the cabinet. They are creating a situation where Hurricane Harvey becomes the new normal.

They should resign.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

CBC News: “Tropical storm Harvey: Drone footage of flood damage”

Posted in Featured,Syria | 14 Responses | Print |

20,000 Civilians Trapped in besieged ISIL capital: “The Worst Place on Earth”

By Juan Cole | Aug. 30, 2017 |

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By Roshni Majumdar | (Inter Press Service) | – –

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 28 2017 (IPS) – The battle to reclaim Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL/Da’esh), has raised concerns among top UN officials as at least 20,000 civilians remain trapped under heavy fire in the city. Last week Monday, 42 civilians, including 12 women and 19 children, were killed in an air attack, according to the AP.

The heavy fighting to drive out ISIL, led by the United States (US) coalition and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), has come under attack for its relentless air raids, which has killed hundred of civilians since June, according to a report by Amnesty International. SDF typically bears the responsibility to chart coordinates for airstrikes which are led by the US coalition. However, this has also made room for gross miscalculations and loss of both SDF fighters, at least 18 in April, and civilians, whose numbers remain unknown.

When Jan Egeland, a top advisor to the UN Special Envoy for Syria, briefed journalists in Geneva recently, he spoke to the complexity of the situation in Raqqa, as ISIL encircles the city and traps civilians to use them as human shields. Additionally, a collapse of communication, he said, has made things worse.

“I say this also recognizing here and in the Humanitarian Task Force that the difference between this situation and Aleppo and other besieged areas is that we do not have contact with those holding those neighborhoods in Raqqa,” Egeland said. He stressed that a lack of “two-way communication” and a “very deliberate policy of holding people, and using them as human shields” has scared civilians into staying in the city.

Egeland said that he could not imagine a “worse place on earth now than in these five neighborhoods” referring to the areas under the terror of ISIL control.

Still, many have left the city and the UN was able to reach those escaping. In his remarks, Egeland stressed all member parties of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), which was established in 2015 to build policies towards peace in the region, to help civilians escape into safer areas. The decision to do so, he said, rested with the members of the US-led coalition, who are also key members of ISSG.

To those who have escaped, assistance has been provided from 50 concentration points around the city. Approximately, 260,000 people who have escaped the city have received aid, although conditions within the city remain dire.

Similarly, cautions are also being raised in the city of Deir ez-Zor, which is home to 90,000 people, and where clashes between ISIL and pro-government forces have lately ramped up.

The Syrian conflict has prompted several rounds of negotiations, as warring parties have convened in Geneva, Ankara and Kazakhstan for diplomatic intra-Syrian negotiations. The next round of talks, set in Kazakhstan, has been delayed until the middle of September.

The Security Council will be briefed by the Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, this Wednesday, August 30th.

Via Inter Press Service

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Al Jazeera English: “Calls for safe passage of civilians trapped in Syria’s Raqqa”

Posted in Displaced and Refugees,Donald Trump,Pentagon,Syria | No Responses | Print |

Is Israel’s Netanyahu preparing for War on Iranian Special Ops in Syria?

By Juan Cole | Aug. 29, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu filled the ear of visiting UN secretary general Antonio Guterres with complaints about Iran and Hizbullah on the latter’s visit to the region.

He complained that the UN border patrol, UNIFIL, in South Lebanon, has not reported the thousands of rockets delivered to Hizbullah by Iran.

He also alleged that Tehran is turning Syria into a military base, and aims at making Damascus and Beirut two fronts from which it can launch war on Israel.

He also accused Iran of establishing factories in Syria and Lebanon to build precision missiles so that it can destroy Israel, which he said is Iran’s goal.

He said Iran was making Damascus a fortress from which it could attack.

Netanyahu had made similar accusations and exhibited similar bluster on a recent trip to see Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Since Iran is useful to Putin in Syria, inasmuch as he wants to see Sunni radicals allied with extremist Chechens defeated. He is therefore unmoved by Israeli unease, which in any case is not well founded.

Netanyahu’s dark apocalyptic fantasies would be a little comical if he were not so erratic and did not give every evidence of believing them.

First of all, Iran has not vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map. Rather, Iran has a no first strike policy that has been repeatedly underlined by Ayatollah Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. The only country in the region that has gone around invading other countries until recently was Israel. Nowadays Saudi Arabia has joined the club with its attack on Yemen.

Second of all, Iran has not turned Damascus into a fortress or Syria into an army base. Iran sent Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps officers to Syria to train and advise the Syrian Arab Army. They are the equivalent of special ops. It is likely that there aren’t more than a couple of thousand Iranian military personnel in the country. Iranian officers have died at such a rate that they must have been in the field leading Hizbullah and Iraqi Shiite militias rather than only in the barracks doing training. There are estimated to have been as few as 500 Iranian personnel killed in Syria despite the big battles at places like Aleppo, and so there just can’t be very many Iranian troops fighting there. Of the couple thousand, a substantial number appear to be Afghan refugees in Iran who were pressed into service on pain of being sent back to Afghanistan.

This tiny rag tag force helped make a difference for the al-Assad regime in fighting Sunni rebels who have only light to medium weaponry. But it isn’t the kind of force that offers a significant threat, or a threat at all, to Israel. Even when al-Assad had 300,000 men under arms and a proper army and good Russian tanks, no one thought Syria was a serious challenger to Israeli military might. what about now, when it has been devastated by civil war.

Third, Iran is very unlikely to be building missile factories in Syria and Lebanon, and Netanyahu just asserts these things rather than giving any evidence for them. He is a one man walking fake news. Israel has several hundred atomic bombs and the means to deliver them, and Iran is not so crazy as to send a missile against Israel.

Likewise, Hizbullah, of which Netanyahu is so afraid, is just a regional militia. It has no armor to speak of and no air force.

The only reason for Netanyahu to be afraid of Hizbullah is if he wanted to invade Lebanon and/or Syria. It would put up a good guerrilla defense, as in 2006. But it isn’t capable of offensive action against the Israeli army, the best-equipped military in the Middle East.

Netanyahu is actually just using the alleged Iranian bogey man to take the spotlight off his own aggressive military actions against Palestinians in the West Bank, whom he is gradually expelling from their property.

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Posted in Featured,Iran,Israel/ Palestine,Syria | 13 Responses | Print |

Top 5 ways Man-made Climate Change made Hurricane Harvey much Worse

By Juan Cole | Aug. 28, 2017 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The images from Houston and its environs are heart-breaking and we at IC wish all those affected a speedy and safe return to normality.

Extreme weather events are associated with climate change, and whenever they occur, they raise the question of their relationship to that process.

Human-induced climate change did not “cause” Hurricane Harvey. There have after all been hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico all along, and some of them have been monstrous. So can we relate Hurricane Harvey to human pumping of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere by driving cars, heating or cooling buildings, etc.?

The answer is “yes.” Climate change did not produce Harvey the Hurricane, but climate change made Harvey worse than it would otherwise be. Maybe 30% worse. That is, if Harvey dumps 4 feet of water on the Houston area in 2017, that suggests it would only have dumped 2.64 feet of rain if it had arisen in the 1749 hurricane season when Spanish settlers in Texas made peace with the Lipan Apache tribe.

That is because in 1749, there were 270 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and today there are 410 ppm of CO2. The parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have fluctuated between 200 and 270 for the last 800,000 years . Homo Sapiens Sapiens is only about 200,000 years old, so this is the only climate we’ve ever known. Starting in the late 1700s, human beings started behaving like a global bank of super-volcanoes, spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than had ever occurred in the history of the earth. Hundreds of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide, through the burning of massive amounts of coal, as well as petroleum and natural gas. Ordinarily, going from 270 ppm of CO2 to over 400 would take millions of years of heightened vulcanism.

h/t EPA

One of the foremost experts in climate science, Professor Michael Mann of Penn State, explained how human-caused climate change made Harvey worse:

1. The sea off the Texas coast is half a foot higher than it used to be, because of global heating. Hotter water expands to fill more space, and melting surface ice that used to be on the land mass of Antarctica and Greenland and is now in the oceans as extra water and caused the sea level to rise. (The level of the land can also be lowered by e.g. drilling for oil). When the sea level is higher, that allows higher storm surges, leading to extra flooding.

2. The increase in the surface temperature of the ocean over the mid-20th century by about 1 degree Fahrenheit increased the amount of moisture in the air above it by 3-5%. More moisture in the air means that when it rains, it really pours.

3. The water in the Gulf of Mexico is warmer than a few decades ago, and warm water feeds hurricanes the way anger feeds the Incredible Hulk. Harvey was significantly more intense as a storm because it developed over warmer water.

These three causes are rock solid and without much doubt about them.

Mann points to a couple of other likely but not certain ways global heating made Harvey worse.

4. Climate Change contributed to a stronger high pressure system in the Gulf of Mexico, which pushed the jet stream north and allowed Harvey to malinger in Houston’s area instead of being pushed away by strong winds from dry land. The winds were left weakened by the migration north of the Gulf Stream.

5. Global heating seems to contribute to longer-term stationary weather patterns. Thus, the long-term drought in the US Southwest was exacerbated by this tendency. Harvey might not have stayed where it was so easily without climate change.

Mann’s conclusion that climate change made Harvey worse is chilling. Because we’re only at the beginning of global heating. There is a long lag between the time you burn the coal and the time the surface of the earth heats up (we are talking about average temperatures, and the oceans are cold and heat up very gradually). We are already locked in to going up another 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and now with Trump and Scott Pruitt turning the US into one big bonfire, we’re probably going up 4-5 degrees Fahrenheit. That amount of global heating could be catastrophic. The jury is out on whether much hotter oceans will produce more hurricanes or not. What is certain is that the ones that are produced will be much more intense.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Democracy Now! “Climate Change Makes Storms like Harvey More Severe”

Posted in Climate Change,Environmentalists,Extreme Weather,Featured,Ice Melt,Sea Level | 8 Responses | Print |

Iraq: Trump slams Iran, but Iran-backed Militias are key to taking Talafar from ISIL

By Juan Cole | Aug. 27, 2017 |

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by Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Shiite popular mobilization units (Iran-backed militias) have played a key role in taking of the northern city of Talafar from ISIL. The ninth armored division of the regular army and the military’s counter-terrorism brigandes have also played an important role. A government spokesman said that only 5% of the city center remains in the hands of Daesh (ISIL, IS, ISIS). The government has also captured the city’s citadel.

Iraqi government spokesman Yahya Rasul said that the neighborhoods in the north of the largely Turkmen city still under Daesh / ISIL control included al-Muthanna al-Awwal, al-`Askari, and al-Sina`a. Some 27 other neighborhoods in the city have been liberated.

The military campaign continues to liberate the remaining 30% of the city and its environs still in Daesh hands.

On Friday, the Shiite militias had discovered a major Daesh/ ISIL weapons stockpile.

The Shiite militias had been kept out of the battle for Mosul, except to the degree that they surrounded it to the West and north and prevented Daesh fighters from escaping to Syria. Because Mosul is a largely Sunni Arab city with a proud Sunni heritage, having it conquered by the Shiite militias would have been problematic. Talafar, however, has a significant Shiite community and it used, as least, to be the majority, and so the same sensitivities are not there in this campaign.

The Sunni Arab Gulf press is complaining about Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi’s deployment of these Shiite militias, saying that even Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr disapproved of them playing a leading role in the assault.

In past campaigns by the popular mobilization units in Sunni areas, there have been reprisal killings and village massacres, making these militias anathema in the largely Sunni Gulf. Al-Khaleej in the UAE says that Iranian leader Ali Khamenei hailed the militias in ways that make it clear he views them as a pro-Iran force he can use to intervene in Iraqi affairs.

However upset the Sunni Arab monarchies in the Gulf might be, the Shiite militias are prominent in the Talafar campaign, and it is clear that Iran is happy enough with their role.

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Posted in Featured,Iraq | 4 Responses | Print |